Well Ladies and Gentlemen,
As daylight slowly begins to wind down around 10:40 PM, today dealt me an odd hand. I thought I was going to have to force Grapes of Wrath down the throats of my students but they surprised me. The instant backlash I expected from watching a black and white movie never came, they were intrigiued with the story and were continually asking me questions about the film. It was a nice way to hop back into the saddle after being out a couple days. I have found that at times that is the hardest thing to try and reign the kids back in after a couple days of subs and monotonous activities. Who knows I may slowly be getting the hang of this teaching gig. The kids are an interesting mix of buzzing around and working hard. Students who have kind of slacked off are kciking it into high gear and wanting to get through with phases. I find my classes are slightly changing towards the end of the year, we are approaching modern day in my AK history class and I find our topics are perhaps slightly more enganging than the history of the steamships we have discussed. No joke people my knowledge of Alaskan Steamships has grown to be pretty immense. Now if it only it came up as a Jeopardy topic... I feel I have killed this subject for my students which is probably the biggest crime I could have commited with what seemed to be an underhand pitch. I just couldn't pull it all together, too much mundane information, and few ways to synthesize the info into something that would be more remotely interesting than a hisotry channel presentation. Not to knock the History Channel, I enjoy it, but I am afraid it is not the top of the charts for my students. Just want to get these last two weeks out of the way so I can start putting all my energy into prepping for my next semesters material which is looking like...drumroll please...American Government, World History, maybe entrepeneurship and/or Parenting, PE, Career Exploration. A little scatterbrained, however with enough prep time, this summer I want to nail these classes out of the park. Year two is approaching, the excuse that I am a first year teacher will be invalid in three weeks. Teaching is all about planning, keeping the kids engaged not just with activities but having them engaged in a cohesive curriculum that they can follow. I am failing in trying to teach these carnegie courses like a real course, I need to vere off and maybe try to phase them. Give the kids benchmarks to try and hit, I have got all kinds of goals I want to hit for next year, weekly grade printouts posted, have the course lined out before the semester begins. Do projects but the rough part with that is creativity, so if You are reading this, leave a comment with any project ideas you remeber doing as a student that you enjoyed. If ten people read this there is a cumulative amount of at least 100 years of schooling and projects in your conscious. I hated projects and I think as a result I have blcked out most of those I tried to acocmplish.

So today I was once again impressed by my students problem solving and perception. We can look at event and view it as either a dilemma or find a way to get by it. For example, our school is down to 16,000 gallons of water for the remaining 21 days of May. Now you can can look at that and do some rough math and figure that we need to use less than about 750 gal a day. Now we have a school with 250 students and faculty, and students love to use the bathroom. The toilets flush more than a gallon per flush but let sround down. If every student goes once, we are down to 500. I have not showered at my house for ten days,(I had a shower in quinhagak however it was almost frozen, I have never felt water that cold in my life!) A majority of the teachers have begun to live as if we had no water and there has been some lamentations. A student came over to visit and while we lamenting she was able to offer solution after solution. It gave me pause, man I have no excuse to not have clean clothes she is right, I should go out fill a pot with snow while it is still close to my house and boil it for laundry. If I spent half as much energy on focus on a solution instead of complaining about the problem it would be nonexistant. It is all about how you roll with the changes, you can gripe about them or you can incorporate them and keep on trucking. Excuses have kind of plagued me this year, it becomes almost to easy to claim ignorance, or give ni to feeling overwhelmed. To do somethign about it ladies and gentlemen thats what we need to strive for. Much like a parent rubbing our back and telling us its ok we tried our best, we can lull ourselves with excuses, until we create our own insurmountable demons. Be wary of the hydra of excuses, each head you vanquish presents the opportunity to give up because you have tried so hard,you feel you just can't do it anymore. I will be honest I am not %100 sure how I personally am going to accomplish this, I know one of my biggest weaknesses is organization, maybe if I make a concerted effort into tackling it, developing it, I wont consider it a reason for my faults. Ladies and gentlemen I am just taking an idea and running with it, thanks for coming along for the ride!

Any project ideas you enjoyed doing for American Government, World History, Entrepenuership, Parenting(outside of making babies, I don't how well that would fly with my principal) please comment!